(maillist maintainer/jonas: I wrote a similar message from a non-subscribed email addr. It can be discarded, sorry)

I needed a html parser, and am not in a hurry, so I decided to check FPC's own first, in the hope that I can at least make some documentation in the wiki /examples during the experience.

The first project is simple, see program below, executed on FPC's html documentation. I noticed that it failed like this:

An unhandled exception occurred at $004284EC :
EDOMError : EDOMError in DOMDocument.CreateElement hr/0 $004284EC
$00411A86 THTMLTODOMCONVERTER__READERSTARTELEMENT, line 500 of src/sax_html.pp
$0042648A TSAXREADER__DOSTARTELEMENT, line 738 of src/sax.pp $004110DC THTMLREADER__ENTERNEWSCANNERCONTEXT, line 391 of src/sax_html.pp
$00410C80 THTMLREADER__PARSE, line 358 of src/sax_html.pp $0042612C TSAXREADER__PARSESTREAM, line 647 of src/sax.pp $00411F3D READHTMLFILE, line 609 of src/sax_html.pp $00411E91 READHTMLFILE, line 593 of src/sax_html.pp $004015DE main, line 21 of saxattempt.dpr

Some debugging seems that it fails on <hr/>, doctype of the doc in question is

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Some questions for the more xmlable:
1. is this correct? I think <hr/> is more xml notation than html notation?
2. can I somehow convince (override) DOM to accept it? (since modifying the generator (tex4ht) might prove to be difficult). It could be genera
3. Is there a way to have line numbers in the exceptions? Modifying the source with writeln's to find out which tag exactly goes wrong is a bit ugly.

Note that I'm already happy with pointers where to start. Anybody willing to share private examples or documentation would be great too.

program saxattempt;
{$mode delphi}
Uses Sax_HTML,sysutils,classes,dom_html;
var d:TSearchRec;
    sx : THTMLDocument;
    Htmls: TStringList;
begin
  htmls:=TStringList.create;
  if findfirst('*.html',faanyfile,d)=0 then
    begin
      repeat
        writeln(d.name);
        sx:=THtmlDocument.create;
        ReadHtmlFile(sx,d.name);
        htmls.addobject(d.name,sx);
      until findnext(d)0;
      findclose(d);
    end;
end.

For html this is not correct, but that file might happen to be xhtml. In general, FPC's xml parser is much more developed than html parser, therefore many FPC tools actually write xhtml.

2. can I somehow convince (override) DOM to accept it? (since modifying the generator (tex4ht) might prove to be difficult). It could be genera

I think it would be better to fix sax_html.pp either to handle this condition gracefully (strip '/'), or raise a exception. If it raises an exception, that exception could contain location information you need.

3. Is there a way to have line numbers in the exceptions? Modifying the source with writeln's to find out which tag exactly goes wrong is a bit ugly.

The exceptions generated by parser contain this information (for xml, this is EXMLReadError.Line, EXMLReadError.LinePos). sax_html seems not to generate exceptions at all :(
The exceptions raised from DOM methods (like CreateElement) do not have location information because these methods are primarily intended for building DOM tree from code, when there is no source file.

Regards,
Sergei

In our previous episode, Sergei Gorelkin said:

There is a patch at:

http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=13409

It seems neither sax reader supports this, I can't find try excepts in sax_xml that would support this either.